How to increase your productivity through systemisation with Dale Beaumont

Dale’s Bio

Dale Beaumont is an Award-Winning Technology Entrepreneur, International Speaker and the Author of 19 Best-Selling books.

Dale started his first business at 19 and has been building companies ever since. One of those companies is now a multimillion dollar enterprise, which has enabled Dale to become an Investor, Philanthropist and to step foot in 85 countries.

Dale has been featured in Forbes, The Huffington Post, Business Insider, Gizmodo and GQ, just to name a few.

With a passion to give back, Dale’s goal is to help more than one million entrepreneurs around the world with Bizversity – a revolutionary product, which gives you direct access to ‘The World’s Best Business Training. Anywhere, Anytime.’

Best described as the ‘Netflix for Business’, Bizversity gives you exclusive access to thousands of videos, which have been produced by leading business experts from around the globe.

Transcript

CLARE: Something I’ve learned the hard way is that ignoring systems and processes, as you’re building your business can come back to bite you. Today, I talked to Dale Beaumont from Business Blueprint around how to increase your productivity and efficiency through systemisation. We also chat about how he has created a business that is set up, that he can take three whole months off business and go travelling. This episode is full of gems, and I know you will love it.

You’re listening to the Clare Wood podcast, where we talk all things business, finance, marketing, and mindset for entrepreneurs, sharing practical tips, and actionable advice to help you take your business to the next level. Introducing your host: me! I’m Clare Wood, I’m a numbers geek, a travel lover, and a reality tv addict, and I’m here to empower you to create an extraordinary business and an amazing life, because I believe you don’t have to choose between the two. Now let’s dive right in to today’s episode.

CLARE: Welcome to the podcast, Dale. Now I love your business model. I think it’s fantastic. And I had to get you to come onto the podcast as the first ever male I have had on The Clare Wood Podcast. I wanted to bring you on to chat all about your business. So the business is called Business Blueprint. So maybe if you can share a little bit about your business and about who you are and your journey?

DALE: Yeah, sure. So I grew up in a family of entrepreneurs. My dad was a small business owner and my mum helped my dad in the business. Growing up I was always driving around with my dad visiting clients and helping him send out invoices, looking at who’s paid and not, all those types of things. So that was a lot of fun, then I got involved in sport. I was a gymnast for about 10 years and represented Australia in gymnastics and later in competitive aerobics. And then after that I left school went into the workforce for about six months and realised to really achieve a success, I had to really do what my dad did and start a business.

I started when I was 19, my first company, which is actually still running to this day, nearly 20 years later, that company still operates. Now my main company is Business Blueprint, but I also have interest now in not more than a dozen other companies that I’m involved in as a partner and shareholder. I just have fun growing businesses. That’s really what I love, but the main company is called Business Blueprint and that’s a company designed to help other entrepreneurs to build their dreams. We do some great work and we run lots of events and we have worked with more than 500 business owners, every single year.

CLARE: Fab. And so talk to me about the word blueprint and why it’s a pivotal part of your business.

What is a blueprint and why it is pivotal to business

DALE: So blueprints, it was based on my own experience of when I was starting growing my business. I was doing all these other programs and one of the things that really frustrated me was that most other programs told people what to do, but didn’t really show people the actual steps. Like where’s the checklist? Where’s the roadmap? And there really wasn’t any. So what I chose to do is to start creating them and now we have more than 500. It’s step-by-step, how to implement success straight into their business. So that’s the reason why we called our company Business Blueprint because we give people the blueprints for business success.

CLARE: Fantastic. So you’re obviously big into systems, big into procedures. I would love to know what are some of your best hacks for being more organised in business?

DALE: Wow, that’s a big question. There’s lots of different things to do. I suppose the first thing would be to embrace technology, it’s your friend. If you embrace technology with the whole goal of becoming more efficient, rather than doing things manually. Some practical things that you can do is have a good place to store all of your systems. I call it a knowledge hub for your business. You want to have a good CRM, you want to have some type of tool to manage all your projects and then later on, if you’re doing content marketing there’s a whole bunch of tools that you could use there to help you speed things up.

There are lots of different hacks. In fact, there’s 52 of them. When I run events, there’s an event called 52 ways, I share 52 different strategies to save time, save money, help people get better, faster results. It’s number one is to embrace technology and the other things would be just to make sure that you’re really clear on what your priorities are. A lot of people spend a lot of time doing things that are just not that important right to their business right now. So knowing what your top 3 priorities are on any given day or week or month is really, really important. One of my mentors said to me, once that “sequencing equals success”. It’s all about doing the right things in the right order. I see a lot of people doing stuff that is just a nice thing to do, but it’s actually not what they need in business right now. You need to know what problems you’re trying to solve or what things you want to fix and make sure that you’re working on the right things at the right time, that’s going to be key to making sure that you are productive.

The last little thing I’d say is about realising the fact that as a business owner you can’t do it all on your own. You need to get some help. Once you start growing your business, you definitely need to start embracing outsourcing and do what you do best and then outsource the rest. So I’ve now got a team of 20 team members which around 10 of them are here in our Australian office in Sydney. Then the other 10 are in our office in the Philippines, that we have as well. We would definitely not have the success that we have today if we had not built that team.

CLARE: I love that. One of my favourite things that you said was about prioritising what’s important. I literally was saying this to a client today because a lot of times things like your inbox, it pops up, but that’s everyone else’s agendas. Right. And everyone else’s priorities. And to your point, if you’re focusing in on what’s the most important thing for you to shift the needle in your business, then you’re driving your own ship, right?

DALE: Yeah, exactly. That’s another thing where people spend a lot of time is on their email. The best practice is normally to check it twice a day, once in the morning, maybe once at night and then that’s it, have it down the rest of the time, so you can focus on what you needed to do.

CLARE: Okay. So you’re a bit of a tech guy, you love your programs. I’d love to know what are your favourite programs and software for being more organised as a small business owner?

The top programs for keeping small business owners organised

DALE: Yeah, these are must have tools. One is that like a mind mapping tool that I use to get stuff out of my head and I use that to map my entire business a few years ago. One of the best things that I ever did. So the one that I used is called FreeMind, it’s a free mind mapping tool that you can download and use to get everything out of your head. So it’s a good place to start to unpack your brain literally, and then have it all there in front of you. Or if you’re heavily into Microsoft suite, you could also use SharePoint. These are basically places where you store all of your systems. So when you want to do take the structure, the framework that you’ve created in your freemind, a mind map, and then put it into a Google sites and set up your departments and your filing structure for all of your knowledge and intellectual property and all of your systems and policies, procedures all goes in one central place. So that’s another one of the tools I think is a must have.

Then every business needs to have some type of CRM system. A CRM stands for customer relationship management, and there’s different ones out there. The one that I use is called Ontraport. ActiveCampaign is another one. We’ve got a whole list of them that we could send you, but find one that you like and start embracing it, this so many great things you can do. If you’ve got a good CRM system, it’ll save you about 10 hours a week of manual tasks, because so much of what you can do in your business, you can now automate thanks to technology. So definitely need a CRM.

Next you need some type of task management software to manage all of the to-do’s in your business internally. Then you can also set up projects and then you can put those projects on repeat when you get a new client coming in, you can click a button and all the workflows automatically just appear. So people know what they’re doing on any given day. And you, as the owner can see this birds eye view of what’s happening in your entire organization. So I use one called teamwork, teamwork.com, or otherwise you could use one called Asana is another one or base camp is another, and these are either free or very, very low cost.

I’m going to save you a huge amount of time when it comes to managing social media and other tools called a whoop social, and this helps you to schedule all of your social media posts, that one has saved a lot of time. Others are buffer, a one two, if you’re doing images I recommend one called image resizer by promo, that’ll save you some time. Vietname is a tool for making videos as well, Vidsy for writing sales scripts. I could go on and on. Rev is one I love as well for recording meetings and getting things transcribed. So there’s heaps of great tools out there to make you more productive.

CLARE: If you want to hear Dale chat a bit more about systems, you have to go along to 52 ways. That was one of the most incredible free events I’ve ever been to. It was just absolutely packed with value, and I can see how much passion you’ve got about sharing about systems. So thanks so much for sharing them.

Now, I wonder if we can come away from systems and tech for a bit. There’s two things that really stood out to me about your business model that I really love. And one of them is about giving and it’s obviously something that you’re really passionate about and you’ve made a lot of space for in your business. I’d love if you could share a little bit about why that’s so important to you as a business owner and how you go about doing it in your business?

The importance of giving as a business owner

DALE: I think as a business owner, it’s so important that to stay inspired. You’re facing all the challenges in your business and you’ve got to have something that’s motivating you, something that’s driving you. Oftentimes in the first few years of business it’s to pay the bills and then it’s to have some financial security and give the kids a better education, or maybe it’s to look after, your parents that might need extra help and support. And that’s totally fine. And I think that’s really important at the beginning to get all those things done. But when you have achieved all those basic needs, then you go what’s next.

And then after a while you go into wealth building and you should invest in property and put some money into shares and do all that. But then what happens after you’ve done that as well, then you go, okay, well, I need something else to motivate me and what we chose to do, my wife and I said that we want to align ourselves with a charity that we’re passionate about. We chose this big Australian charity called Hands Across the Water. They build homes in Thailand and support more than 350 children that don’t have proper care. Some of them are even kids with HIV or with mental or physical disabilities as well. And so we now support their organization each year in the last seven years, which have been doing this, we’ve raised more than $2 million to support them.

That’s just what inspires me. My advice is that find a cause that you’re passionate about and start giving. And the more that you give then the more you will receive, and if you have that abundance mindset and you continue to attract new opportunities to you. You’ve got to open your heart and just care and it will always come back.

CLARE: Yeah. I love that. It’s ultimately about creating something that’s bigger than just you, right. So amazing that you’ve got that ethos and that you’ve been able to contribute so much to such an important charity. The other big thing that I love about your story, is that you take off three months of the year. You don’t work and you travel. So tell us a bit about that. Firstly, how did that come about and how do you actually make that happen inside a successful business?

How to make a 3 month break, a possibility in your business

DALE: We started doing this in 2008, and I’ve been doing it for more than a decade. My wife and I basically sat down and we thought, we’ve got bills that are being paid and staff being paid and we’re making some good profit each year. So we decided that we will travel and see the world with our kids.

One of the things that also inspired me was reading a book called the four hour week by Tim Ferris. He talked about rather than waiting until you’re 60 or 70 to retire and then like, you’ve got these 10 years to live your life. Why don’t you take these mini retirements? So what we decided to do do two months working and then one month traveling the world, two months working while I travelled, two months work one month travel. So it works out to be somewhere between three to four months a year that we’re normally out of the country.

We’ve been to about 85 countries around the world and we just love to experience new places, new cultures and new foods. That’s just something that we’re passionate about and when you have a successful business and you’ve built great systems, and you’ve got a great team and you’ve done all the hard work of laying that really strong foundation, then you can enjoy the fruits of your business. That could be different things to different people, but for us, we love creating experiences, because at the end of the day, whoever has the most money is still going to die at the end, so you may as well live your life and create lots of memories along the way.

CLARE: That’s super inspiring to me, I’m a big traveller. And the thought of doing that every year is just so exciting to me, but this is something that we forget, right? When you run your own business, you are in charge. So you can create the business and life that you want. We can make decisions and we can set up systems, teams, processes to create whatever it is that we want.

DALE: Now we put our family first and then our life and next our lifestyle. And then after that, you know, our business and our business just fits in. With technology it’s possible to run and manage a business. If you’ve got all the things that I mentioned before, you’ve got a good library of systems, you’ve got a good CRM system, you’ve got a good project management tool and you’ve got good staff and good reporting and good bookkeeping and accounting and all this type of things, you can log in and you can see where everything’s at within three or four minutes. You can know whether you’re on track or you’ve got to step in and you’ve got to do something. It’s never been easier to run your business from anywhere in the world.

CLARE: If anyone’s listening and they would like to learn more about business blueprint or how to get in touch with you, how can they do so?

DALE: You can just go to our website. If you just Google Business Blueprint or find us at blueprint.com or businessblueprint.com that will take you to the same place. And then on the website we have 5 free videos that we give away, I share with you five different ‘must have’ tech tools. You can just pop your details in and we’ll keep in touch. You can just learn from us basically when you start, everything is free. So we just try to give and give and give as much as possible. Then if you like what we do and you want to work with us, then you can, there’s no pressure. The right type of people are attracted to us anyway. If you want to know more about me personally, got to dalebeaumont.com and you can find out about some of the other projects that I’m up to as well.

CLARE: Fabulous. Well, thank you so much for coming on the podcast and for sharing so much of your wisdom today. I wish you all the best and look forward to connecting again soon.